Doug's Crapsack World
by JohnnyLurg
Summary: Doug belongs to the Beet Generation.


**Doug's Crapsack World**

Dear Journal, what a long strange trip it's been. It's funny, when I moved to Bluffington nearly twenty-five years ago, I took the town's world-famous harvesting of beets for granted. Don't get me wrong, Journal, even when I lived in Bloatsburg, I always knew that Bluffington was the beet capital of the world, and I always smelled the pungent odor of beet crops sifting through my nostrils every time my family and I would pass through Bluffington on the way to Grandpa Funnie's cabin in New Hamster.

In fact, now that I think about it, Journal, the first time I ever ate a beet was when my best friend Skeeter introduced me to them at Chez Honque, formerly the Honker Burger. Naturally, he assumed I had eaten them long before because an early draft of a song I wrote for our garage band, "I Want to Hold Your Ham," contained a lyric that sounded like "beets taste good." Actually, I wanted the song to be in the style of one of our mutual favorite bands, coincidentally called The Beets, and I included the line in question as a tribute to that band and to remind fans that they have good taste in music. I still think it was one of our best songs, and would have been a worthy follow-up single to "Bangin' on a Trash Can."

And while The Beets are still one of my favorite bands, I realize that they never could have achieved their worldwide success without the influence of beets themselves. Sure, they once claimed to "eat [their] sugar cereal" even though "it makes [their] teeth bacterial," but they were ultimately unable to hide their love for one of the healthiest vegetables around. Even the lyrics to both "Killer Tofu" and "I Need More Allowance" were the product of a single dream drummer Chap Lippman had after a long night of drinking beet juice with the rest of the band. "I must have had about 17 beet drinks that night," Lippman once remarked in an interview I watched while doing the same.

Yet the beneficial effects of the beet crop are not limited to one's creativity. After my girlfriend Patti Mayonnaise's mother died in a freak car accident, doctors thought her father, who was horribly crippled in the same accident, would have days to live. A born skeptic, Mr. Mayonnaise ignored the medicines prescribed to him and went to the supermarket, where he loaded up on some of Bluffington's most acclaimed beets. Mr. Mayonnaise is still alive to this day, is happily married to a former teacher of mine, and has another kid on the way, all thanks to the underappreciated medicinal properties of the beet crop.

So, with all these benefits, it may come as a strange shock to you that Bluffington's city government issued a ban on beets, rendering the consumption, selling, and purchasing of the vegetable illegal. Not only that, but according to one of Chap Lippman's newest spoken word albums, Mayor Willy W. White has ordered government helicopters to spray toxins on the beet crops of Yakestonia, the nation where 99% of illegal beet products are currently smuggled into the United States from.

In addition to Patti and Skeeter, with whom I still eat the forbidden root with every day, another long-time acquaintance of mine has publically voiced his opposition to anti-beet legalization: Roger Klotz. Sure, my former bully was quick to denounce The Beets as "overrated" and "a one-hit wonder" back in high school, long after they had broken up for the final time and the disastrous _Let it Beet _movie nearly bankrupted them, but three factors have led him to despise the War on Beets and the administration which devised it:

Mayor Willy W. White started his life as a well-meaning but extraordinarily dull child, bullied by trailer trash students like Roger who envied his prominent political connections. Roger ultimately took Willy under his wing and taught him to bully other children after being enlightened by a speech given by Willy's father, former Mayor Robert "Bob" White. (Roger once confided in me that the lack of a father figure in his life also played a role in his closeness to Willy, hoping to gain the respect of the mayor, who unfortunately never remembered that Roger existed, even when he served as Principal of Beebe Bluff Middle School after a landslide defeat in a mayoral election). Roger was prone to taking advantage of Willy's stupidity, and the last thing he would have wanted was for Willy to assume a position higher than his own (though he surely knew it was inevitable, given his father's lingering obsession for continuing the White family's long political legacy).

Though Roger had hoped that Willy would provide him with a significant political position of his own, Willy instead turned to his overbearing father for suggestions. Principal White made a deal with Assistant Principal Lamar Bone to allow the latter administrator's nephew, Percy Femur, to become Assistant Mayor. Both boys struggled academically and would not have bright futures to say the least if it weren't for personal connections. Back in grade school, the no-nonsense military brat Percy Femur had physically assaulted and harassed Roger, who never fully recovered from the emotional trauma of not being the dominant bully at Bluffington Elementary. In retrospect, Roger often regretted not running in the mayoral election as a third party candidate, as he viewed himself to be far more qualified for office than White and Femur or even Democratic candidate Sheldon J. Buttsavage.

Nic-Nacs, the sole factor in Roger's decision that actually relates to beets, the subject at hand, and not petty elementary school drama. The illegalization of beets eliminated the competition for a vaguely beet-flavored substance, Nic-Nacs, which served as a legal alternative to the criminalized plant. For those unfamiliar with Nic-Nacs, they share none of the beneficial qualities of beets, instead possessing numerous side effects which are extremely unhealthy and, in millions of cases, lethal to Nic-Nac users. During his middle school years, Roger gained a reputation for hawking Nic-Nacs and Nic-Nac paraphernalia to impressionable students. After nearly a decade in Nic-Nac rehabilitation centers, Roger is now one year sober and looks back at those troubled years in agony. When asked about his new change of lifestyle, Roger, like Skeeter and I before him, is quick to praise The Beets for guiding his life with their favorite plant. "I guess I never really listened to their music after all," Roger recently admitted to me when I asked of his former disdain for the band. While I recall Roger attending a Beets concert in sixth grade, he mentioned being in such a crappy seating arrangement that he couldn't see or hear the band that he paid good money for, which led to his decades-long assumption that The Beets sounded like bad acoustics.

But will Skeeter, Patti, Roger, and I ever achieve our goal of legalizing beets during our lifetimes? As the song goes, beets me.


End file.
